Crowdflower CEO: My Board Fired Me. Here's What I Learned

> Ask for stories, not advice. Every piece of advice has a more memorable and interesting story behind it. ... When someone starts giving you generic advice, ask them for the real story behind it. Then, you can decide if the advice is relevant to you.

This advice (ahem) seems like it might be generally applicable. If you read the full quote, you will also find that it comes with its own stories!

The impression I get from this post is that there was a lot more going on behind the scenes. That the author's board and investors didn't support him remaining CEO the first time around gives a strong tell of an immature investor. Yes, people change and come around to sensibilities, but it's not like he's a brand new person coming back to the helm.

Those changes could have been made by a board who had fanatical support for the vision and the leader. I seriously doubt Crowdflower's board provided that support the first time, given they canned him like they did.

What everyone should learn from this is that picking the wrong investors when you get funded is the worst possible thing you can do to your company and yourself.

It's good he wasn't tacky enough to make a Steve Jobs allegory... but then Forbes did it for him anyway.

Interesting read, I've used Crowdflower in the past and have had a much better experience than when I tried to use MTurk. However, I was lucky enough to avoid a platform use fee so I'm guessing that's how they can subsidize a lot of the overhead like UI that's not directly related to day-to-day infrastructure.

I'm not sure I follow the story. He was fired or demoted? And now he's back as the CEO again?

Every time someone describes themselves as a leader and organizes their life around "leading," I do a double take. I feel most of these type of personalities are too self centered and difficult to work with. It becomes obvious that they will be blind sided.

Asking for stories over advice is equally short sighted, and isn't going to go any better in the long run. Just because something worked for Bill at UltraTech doesn't mean it's going to work for you at PunchStarter.

Crowdflower is expensive. The contributors are filled with bad contributors (even after turning off the partner networks individually (accuracy of 97%) to justify the 20~30% mark up in fees when you could just use Mechanical Turk.

The fact that you can't just fund your account and use the amount from it. If you want to launch several jobs, you need to cover for the overrun fee which is very annoying if you need to test many tasks and you can't afford to wait 30min~1hr until the funds become available to you again.

All in all, I found Crowdflower was just a very expensive and time consuming overhead and the benefit was far too marginal to be worth the cost.

I'd say avoid all these "platforms" they are nothing more than a complicated form generator which you could simply use a 3rd party tool to do that for you.